THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REGRESSION THERAPY

Blog

by Hans TenDam, MA, CRT
When we do regressions, we do that usually for a clear reason: to solve a psychological or psychosomatic problem. When we hit a past life, we hit the story in a traumatic situation that is directly related to the problem the session is about. Often, we want or even need to know a bit more of that life, if only to understand reactions, options, and circumstances. How did one become so submissive or withdrawn or cruel?
Also to enhance credibility or to satisfy curiosity, we may explore a past life more as a complete story, though usually limited to a number of highlights. We also may have clients look back at their life, to find new insights, new angles or new episodes. We may explore past lifetimes even without a problem to be solved, just to increase self-knowledge, to widen the sense of self, to get a larger perspective on our present life and ourselves. And then a thought hit me and I felt very stupid. I have felt so before, but I still didn’t like the feeling. What about present-life regression? Not to a specific aspect or specific moment, but just to get an overview over the present life: not talking about it, not analyzing it, but reliving it— in overview mode. Imagine to have had about 35 years of experience and never to have thought about this. Maybe quite a few colleagues had thought about this, but I had not.

I started to experiment. Starting with the first memory accessible without trance or regression—reliving that situation with thoughts, feelings and body sensations. Then to the next important life situation. And then the next. Up to the present. It didn’t work too well. Importance didn’t seem to be the right concept. Afterwards I realized that nothing is important or unimportant in general.
Things are only important or unimportant for something: wisdom, happiness, money, stability, or whatever other life goal you can think of.
Then I tried to go to the next decision or decisive moment. Results were confusing. Too many life moments competed to be considered decisive.
In the end I found that the most simple instruction worked best: asking at the end of the earliest memory: So how do you feel about yourself, about people, about the world here? The best way to summarize that appeared to be the question: What is your basic feeling about yourself and your life here?
Then the next instruction would be: Go to the next moment in your life in which you have a different life feeling. We would explore and enhance that memory to a full reliving, asking again for full feelings and thoughts and body sensations. Then to the next moment of a different life feeling, and so on.
Experimenting with colleagues, we found between 4 and 12 of these life moments. At each new moment a different take on life was added while the previous experience, the previous attitude, would continue. It was like each time a new layer to our present identity, our present life experience, was added.
It gave a marvelously alive picture of the present life, stimulating, enlightening and truly an overview.
I saw the first times I went on my own to the city library to read books and the sense of a world opening. Or the first time I was surrounded by nature without a man or any man-made thing inside. Like seeing the planet as it could have been hundreds or thousands of years ago. Several female colleagues got the moment they first were aware of male interest in them in the street. Sometimes the key situations are to be expected, sometimes they are surprising. But they are always enlightening, especially seen as the steps on a ladder.
We have decided to spend a full day in our training program to this simple method. Some colleagues now start with such a process with clients that clearly come for several sessions.
No past lives, no attachments, no deep traumas (in general), but making a one page life summary that vibrates. Try it.